The Jadids were a political, religious, and cultural movement of Muslim modernist reformers within the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century. They normally referred to themselves by the Turkic terms Taraqqiparvarlar ("progressives"), Ziyalilar ("intellectuals"), or simply Yäşlär/Yoshlar ("youth"). The Jadid movement advocated for an Islamic social and cultural reformation through the revival of pristine Islamic beliefs and teachings, while simultaneously engaging with modernity. Jadids maintained that Turks in Tsarist Russia had entered a period of moral and societal decay that could only be rectified by the acquisition of a new kind of knowledge and modernist, European-modeled cultural reform.
Caricature of the Crimean Tatar educator and intellectual Ismail Gasprinsky (on the right), depicted holding the newspaper Terjuman ("The Translator") and the textbook Khoja-i-Sübyan ("The Teacher of Children") in his hand. Two men, respectively Tatar and Azerbaijani Muslim clerics, are threatening him with takfīr and sharīʿah decrees (on the left). From the satirical magazine Molla Nasreddin, N. 17, 28 April 1908, Tbilisi (illustrator: Oskar Schmerling).
Russian Turkestan was the western part of Turkestan within the Russian Empire’s Central Asian territories, and was administered as a Krai or Governor-Generalship. It comprised the oasis region to the south of the Kazakh Steppe, but not the protectorates of the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva. It was populated by speakers of Russian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik.
The Defence of the Samarkand Citadel in 1868
